


(You might just find) You Get What You Need

by 221b_hound



Series: Guitar Man [90]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Father's Day, Gen, Gift Giving, Mother's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:23:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1596461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes used to think ill of Father's Day. Until they became fathers. But those days - Father's Day and Mother's Day - aren't just about celebrating parents (some of whom, let's face it, are very bad at the job). It celebrates something else that is very much worth acknowledgement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(You might just find) You Get What You Need

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a couple of things. First, it's Mother's Day in Australia today. Second, there was a terrific blog post by a writer I love which said how sad she was that gifts like sets of samurai swords weren't also promoted as appropriate gifts, because mothers are not all the same kind of person.
> 
> Third - it's been a tumultuous year for me, in terms of my own mother and her failing health, but layers of baggage are being scraped away by hard realities of life and dying. It's giving me some new perspectives. Things I'm still working through, of course, but maybe there'll be some peace at the end of it.
> 
> The title is of course from the Rolling Stones 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'.

Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes once disparaged Father's Day and Mother's Day as both cloyingly sentimental and hideously commercially driven, full of insincerity, conformity and barely concealed hostility.

That lasted until the first year they became fathers, and both Sally and John had plotted to make something simple for the day: greeting cards for each father, with a framed photograph Sally had insisted on the week before. The picture showed Ford with his two fathers. Baby Ford looked up at the two men with a solemn wonder. Mycroft and Sherlock looked back at that infant with soft eyes and mouths identically on the verge of possibly smiling or possibly quivering with more emotion than either would have previously claimed he was capable of. Sally loved that photograph.)

John was a father himself by then, and knew that whatever the cynical interpretation might be (and as  justified as that cynicism might be for some people) there was something deeply moving about having one’s status as a parent acknowledged. Especially if you’d never, ever thought that you would ever _be_ a parent.

So Mother’s Day and Father’s Day became a thing, especially once the children were old enough to do things like make breakfasts in bed and paint sprawling pictures of ‘my family’ and hand-make cards bearing too much glitter and charmingly terrible handwriting. Violet and Ford between them had such an abundance of parents that these occasions were always somehow turned into a party.

As the children got older and occasionally bought gifts from the shops for their various mums and dads, traditional gendered gifts were obtained. These, however, were very rarely gifted to the parent that society expected to receive such things.

Nirupa, for example, received an awful lot of socks from Violet - though that later turned out to have been due to a misheard complaint, when Violet was very young, about Nirupa not getting enough socks while she was out working on projects. (Violet was very embarrassed when, as a teenager, she finally twigged. By that time, Nirupa had a splendid selection of novelty socks.  Violet made up for it by getting her second mother a truly extravagant bottle of Talisker scotch.)

Sherlock was once the recipient of 100 bottles of nail polish, bought through one of those TV shopping ads when Violet was seven, during her lavish make-up phase. Initially bemused, Sherlock wore some of it for Violet's entertainment, experimented on most of the rest of it, got high as a kite on the fumes and simultaneously solved a puzzling death that turned out to be a murder that only a woman named Merrick had suspected and brought to his attention.

After that, he saved it up for painting Violet and Ford's toes when they came to visit.  He also painted John's toes, whenever the latter incautiously fell asleep barefoot on the sofa when Sherlock was bored.  One time, John didn't even notice until he and Mary were writhing ecstatically away in a very vulnerable position across his bed, and she started giggling and nearly ruined the moment. But then she started sucking his toes while his legs were in the air and her hands were very busy between them, and he was too busy trying to remember how to breathe to care much about the Peaches and Cream Dream polish decorating his toenails. For his sins, Sherlock had to overhear how stimulating the pair of them had found John's pretty feet. He bought himself noise cancelling earphones the very next day. Six pairs.

Sherlock got a lot of hair product too on Father’s Day. And household appliances, but mostly to help replace whichever one he’d most recently destroyed in an experiment. (In truth, he took to experimenting with the appliances he liked least in the month before Father’s Day. He once completely trashed a hair dryer because he decided he didn’t like the colour (burnt orange). Unfortunately, his offspring got him a replacement in a worse colour - beige - and Sherlock was of the opinion that Ford had done it on purpose, at Mycroft’s urging.)

After Sally introduced Ford to the Star Wars films, next Mother's Day, she unwrapped a pair of light sabres, all perspex and flashing lights. They proceeded to stage a _battle royale_ all through the house for the rest of the day and sporadically over the next year. Sally was very good at making the zzzzht zzzzht noises, but Ford enacted the most extravagant death scenes. Mycroft was called upon to do Yoda impersonations to judge the winner of the fights, which made him grateful he’d sat through the dreadful movie marathon with his family. Terrible, terrible films, but the opportunity to play games with his son and his wife was a treasure he would endure any suffering for. (He got his own light sabre next Father’s Day, and taught his wife and son a thing or two about swashbuckling swordplay.)

Mycroft also received one year a pair of pink fluffy lambs-wool slippers. His more staid pair of slippers had fallen apart (all right, with a little help from one of Ford’s experiments that didn't quite go to plan) and Ford wanted to replace them with something luxuriant. He went for pink because that was the colour of the icing on the cupcakes mummy and daddy seemed to really like.

Mary, being an engineer, received a lot of tools, but also clever gadgets: a wind-up radio, solar-powered battery rechargers, a portable shower and a sonic screwdriver pen (and wasn’t John envious of _that_ one). Her favourite was the bright orange surveying compass, not only for its obvious, practical applications but because she’d once used the spiky ends of the tripod to drive off a would-be mugger until Nirupa could clock the moron with a tree branch.

One year early on, John himself quietly gave Mary two new ties for Mother’s Day – some kind of private joke that nobody but Sherlock saw, and that Sherlock understood and pretended not to.

John got a lot of scented bath soaps and shower gels, for those long showers he liked to have, and once, a foot spa (though Sherlock dismantled it for a case one year, to John's intense displeasure). Violet got him a fluffy bathrobe one year, decorated in violets on a pale pink background ‘for when you miss me’, that he practically lived in for a month after, because he missed her and Mary so much when they went with Nirupa to a new project in Senegal. For years, he wore it every time they Skyped. (He sometimes slept in it, but he didn’t admit that to anyone, and Sherlock knew but never said a word.)

Most of the recipients of those gifts knew all too well that all not all parents were caring or kind or loving; not all parents warranted a celebration of any description.

But all of _these_ parents knew that those Hallmark holidays weren’t just about the fact of being a parent. They were about the fact of _love_. They were an excuse to mark the way you could choose to give better than you had received.

They were a reminder to open your eyes to clearly see the connections they had made, young to old, adult to child, parent to beloved extension of their soul, and to never forget that those connections were something to be _built_ , to be _treasured_ , to be celebrated and never ever to take for granted.

**Author's Note:**

> And yes, there is a reference to Atlinmerrick's [Nail Me](http://archiveofourown.org/works/837584/chapters/1595737). Just because.
> 
> I've also made reference to Mary and John and ties before, in Bedroom Hymns. Another story will explore that in more... explicit detail... in due course.


End file.
